Blind Prophecy

The first documentary we made it to was The Education of Shelby Knox directed by Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt. The Lubbock, Texas, high school Shelby Knox attends maintains a strict Abstinence Until Married sex education policy, even though the county’s teen pregnancy and STD rates top the chart. We meet the precocious Shelby in her sophomore year.

Over the course of three years, we watch as Shelby becomes the local spokeswoman championing the cause to revise Sex Ed in the schools. Lubbock has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, and although Shelby plans to wait until marriage, she realizes that as an educational policy, the abstinence only approach just isn’t working.

I may walk away from this year saying that this was the most entertaining movie of the festival. At times funny, at times poignant, and at times so startling that your jaw drops, the real-life people were more interesting and fascinating than any fictional character I’ve seen yet.

Take for example Ed Ainsworth, Shelby’s youth pastor who lectures all over the country in the True Love Waits program. In the beginning of the movie, Shelby comes to him for advise about reconciling her Christian faith with her need to fight this cause of revamping sex ed policies. You can tell that she respects his opinion and genuinely wants his thoughts on the subject. The last time you see these two together, three years later, her body language is all disgust and you sense that these two view each other as enemies meeting on a battlefield.

Ainsworth is, in my mind, the perfect movie villain. He tells Shelby things like “Christianity is actually a very intolerant religion, there are a lot of things we don’t tolerate, and your problem is that you’re a tolerant person.” He firmly believes that giving condoms to kids is like giving them loaded guns and refuses to even acknowledge the contradictions in his own comments about gay people.

What makes this an amazing film is that we watch Shelby grow and develop. Actually, it’s not just Shelby. Her parents, conservative Christian Republicans (by golly!) have a journey of their own as their daughter becomes one of the most vocal liberals in their community. When Shelby decides to throw her support behind a group of gay students trying to fight for a gay-straight alliance and school, her parents can’t even say the words “gay and lesbian” in the first conversation. Later, however, Shelby’s mother joins her daughter in a counter-protest to the Westboro Baptist (“God Hates Fags”) folk.

Perhaps the reason I liked this movie so much is that I recognized so much of my own journey into liberal activism in Shelby. I told her as much when I saw her at a party later that night. She’s as adorable in person as she was in the documentary, literally squealing when I (a complete stranger) told her I was proud of her.

The film is well-crafted on a technical side as well. The pacing is consistent and moves us along without losing focus. One wonders how the directors managed to find not just Shelby, but an amazing group of children, adults and politicians at a point in their respective lives that sparked so much change.

Attached to Shelby Knox we also saw a short documentary called “Bullets in the Hood.” It was made by a teenager living in New York. Let’s just say that it looked and felt like a movie made by a teenager living in the hood. It had one messages (“guns are bad”) from beginning to end and really didn’t do anything at all to open my eyes, educate me, or in any way rock my world.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys